Uber self-facepalm

Ermz

Ermz

¯\(°_o)/¯
Apr 5, 2002
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Melbourne, Australia
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So I've been having technical troubles with my PC for a few months now. They were fairly intermittent, but getting to a point where it was really impacting my ability to work. Today was the last straw.

So while I was swapping every piece of hardware imaginable in order to diagnose this thing I noticed something...

I pulled out my low performance 1TB Caviar Green drive, which stored all my misc. files, videos etc..... or so I thought. I run my system with the drive out and realize.... hey, I still have access to all these files, wtf.

Do some snooping around and realize that for the last 2 years I've been running my non-essential storage crap off my high performance RAID0 array, and my crucial DAW sessions have been running off the shitty Caviar Green drive :Puke:

Shuffling all my files around atm to make it right...
 
lol... yeah fairly deserving of a self facepalm... I do have a question seeing as you mentioned your hdd. SSD Harddrives... I have a lot of friends recommend them to me and for me to use them for my 'Active' mixes etc as they are much, much more reliable etc. Anyone got any thoughts on that?
 
I don't have any SSD drives. They are most certainly not more reliable than standard disc drives in this current generation. They also have limited writes so they should not be used as audio drives, only system or storage drives where you install/write once, and use the rest of their life cycle to only read.
 
^ I'm going to say that's wrong about SSDs. IMO they're way more reliable. As for the limited writes, I was reading somewhere recently that even a mid level SSD if you were to read an write to the disk constantly the drive could last up to 50 years. Although highly doubt this is feasible the reality, the point is that they're not going to stop working after a few months. I'd say you would have no issue getting 3-5 yrs out of an SDD.

I've been running SSD for at least that long in servers that get flogged 24/7 and never lost one. Theses are pretty old now, no where near as good as the new ones. Your biggest issue is the cost.
 
How many of you have your flash memory died on you? It happened when in their "dark times", but nowadays I haven't heard of a single problem with a flash drive, even though some of my friends use them on a daily basis and some of them have had theirs for several years. You'll probably end up upgrading before anything can happen to a solid SSD ;)
 
I'm still willing to hold out a few more years. Their capacity isn't really meeting the demand for most storage needs these days so you could only use it as a small system drive or an 'in progress' session drive.
 
Well capacity is a problem. I've got a 128GB system drive but all my samples are on SATA drives. It is fast and silent. I might get another one to use as a Pro Tools audio drive.

@Wohma - Never. Not lost one yet and they're pretty old now. Keep in mind that when SDDs reach the end of their write cycle they don't just die, you just can't write to them so you can still retrieve what's there. In theory if a drive has a 10k write cycle then you need to write to the full capacity of the disk 10000 times.
 
^ Albeit cripplingly expensive for the price/performance ratio. I'm not sure if you'd even need more than 128GB on a typical windows 7 system drive. Depends entirely on whether you use the same PC for tasks other than audio; an example would be that game save files these days can rack up a decent amount of HDD space.
 
Ermz said:
So I've been having technical troubles with my PC for a few months now. They were fairly intermittent, but getting to a point where it was really impacting my ability to work. Today was the last straw.

So while I was swapping every piece of hardware imaginable in order to diagnose this thing I noticed something...

I pulled out my low performance 1TB Caviar Green drive, which stored all my misc. files, videos etc..... or so I thought. I run my system with the drive out and realize.... hey, I still have access to all these files, wtf.

Do some snooping around and realize that for the last 2 years I've been running my non-essential storage crap off my high performance RAID0 array, and my crucial DAW sessions have been running off the shitty Caviar Green drive :Puke:

Shuffling all my files around atm to make it right...
Click to expand...

i read this and i can't breathe
laughing to hard to breathe
i feel sad for your mix-up and happy that you caught it and i wish you good luck in fixing it
 
That must have been quite a big facepalm.

Somewhat similar story of mine:
During my album recordings I had my system drive die on me (but the audio drive was fine and I had backups anyways, so no biggie).
Got a new drive and set everything up again to continue the recordings. In the following months I suffered badly from random freeze-ups, mostly occurring between 5 minutes and one hour after booting up. To get the PC running again, I usually had to open the case and yank at the SATA cable from the system drive.

Of course I figured the cause was a bad SATA cable, so I replaced the cable to the system drive. Two times actually. Or so I thought, at least... the problem just didn't go away. Needless to say, it quickly became more than just a nuisance, soon I had to really push myself to even turn the PC on anymore, never knowing how much work I could do before the PC would freeze up on me.
One day (about 3 months after the initial crash) I took a close look at the harddrives and realized that all the time I had replaced and yanked at the wrong cable (the one connected to the audio drive, which was fine all the time).
Epic facepalming commenced... then I replaced the other SATA cable.
The problem never occured again.

I feel your pain, Ermin! :wave:
 
I can imagine that ssd drives are quite great for recording in a one room scenario since they're silent due to no moving parts.
 
A normal drive is not really noisy, much less to the point where it would interfere with a recording.

SSDs have come a long way in recent months and the prices are constantly dropping. As I understand it solid state has now become more reliable than the moving plates of traditional HDDs.
I'm DEFINITELY gonna get a 256GB for system files (i.e. Windows only) next year for my new build. Then perhaps a bigger one for duplicating the samples I use most, as prices keep getting lower.

A little tip_ nowadays I have 6 hard drives inside the CPU, and I label them with small pieces of marked masking tape on the side (so I won't accidentally format the wrong one, as it can be very easy to get confused otherwise).



EDIT_ And FWIW, a SATA drive making noises is probably telling you it's about to die.
 
Ho, shiznit. There's a quote I like to say every now and again, and it's only true once I say it out loud.

"You must feel like a dumbass!"

Admitted, I've done similar crap with cheaper redundancy techniques in my earlier years. Ah, to be a rookie.
 
I tested out the RAID array on a current 120+ track session I'm mixing.... holy hell, that's the performance I've needed all along. No more stalling and half-assed buffering whenever I hit playback, and no more glitching on real-time export.

Wonder how many tracks worth of drum editing it can get through without consolidation.

Thanks for the update re: SSDs guys. I'm mostly familiar with the technology circa a year to 6 months ago. There were still teething issues, even then.
 
abt said:
Calm down buddy.


Oh... and stay off the drugs.
Click to expand...

the only drug i do is weed
and i've been around people using the hard-core drugs enough that i don't really consider weed a drug anymore

totally off topic
but if anyone wants to talk about weed, there's a "should we legalize marijuanna" thread in the philosopher's forum
 
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